PPC News Roundup: Is Paid Search’s Mobilegeddon Looming?

Do Google’s recent tests point to a PPC mobilegeddon? Is Yahoo! about to break off its partnership with Bing? Join Tom Kwei as he weighs up the facts, and gathers the most pertinent paid search news from the last fortnight…

PPC Mobilegeddon? Google Testing Mobile-Friendly Labels in Search Ads

Yesterday marked the launch of Google’s mobile-friendly algorithm, otherwise known as ‘mobilegeddon’.

So far, the update has been a concern for SEOs, but paid search managers have had it easy – the algorithm, as Google has made clear, only affects organic mobile search rankings.

Does this mean we’re on the cusp of a mobile-friendly revolution in PPC too? WordStream’s Larry Kim certainly thought so – in a blog post yesterday, he wrote: “Before long, I predict that Google will start giving more weight to mobile optimization as part of its Ad Rank formula.”

Although the new ranking factor only affects organic search, it makes sense that Google will, at some point, also take mobile usability into account when ranking PPC ads. After all, they’re an integral part of the search experience, and are inherently more visible than organic results.

To be clear, since the ‘mobile-friendly’ labels were spotted, Google has told Search Engine Land that it is running tests, but the labels do not have any impact on Quality Score.

A spokesperson also told The SEM Post that there were no plans to roll these labels out fully.

However, this doesn’t preclude the possibility that the labels will roll out eventually – nor does it mean that Quality Score is safe from any tinkering.

The amended terms give Yahoo! more autonomy to deliver its own services, and allow both companies to terminate the agreement early. Before the new deal was agreed, the firms were tied together for ten years – now, as an SEC filing reveals, either company can terminate the agreement with four months’ notice.

Under the terms of the original agreement, Yahoo! agreed to serve Microsoft’s ads in its desktop search results, in return for a portion of Bing Ads revenue. Yahoo! was free to serve ads from any platform in mobile results.

The underlying economic arrangement remains the same. However, Yahoo! now has “increased flexibility to enhance the search experience on any platform, since the partnership is non-exclusive for desktop and mobile”, according to Yahoo!’s announcement.

This means Yahoo! can now serve its own, or other partners’ ads in desktop, as well as mobile results.

Does this mean Yahoo! will jump ship? Bob Peck at SunTrust, quoted in a Benzinga article, predicted that “Yahoo! may choose to invest in and operate both algorithmic and paid search on mobile and desktop going forward”.

However, Search Engine Land’s Greg Sterling believed a split was unlikely, at least in the short term. He wrote:

The question now arises: how likely is Yahoo to walk away from Microsoft/Bing in the near term? Not likely is the answer. There would be significant new costs involved in completely replacing Bing organic and paid search for Yahoo.

Let’s say you want to improve CTR across your text ads by adding sitelinks to all of your campaigns. Previously, you would have individually looked at the ad extensions tab for each campaign to check the status of your sitelinks. For a hundred campaigns, this task could take a couple hours to complete.

Using the campaign details report, you can see all of the campaigns that currently have active or disapproved sitelinks in just a few minutes. Now, you can spend less time searching for your settings and more time activating opportunities that might improve performance.

Starting May 21, advertisers will no longer be able to opt out of close variants – which include misspellings, plurals and other queries “with similar intent” – when setting keywords to exact match in Bing Ads.

Bing Announces Improvements to Negatives and Normalisation

At the same time it announced mandatory close variants for exact match keywords, Bing also introduced a couple of changes to the way it handles negatives, and ‘normalises’ search queries.

Briefly, the new negative matching process will favour bidded keywords over negative keywords, if there is a conflict in place. Previously, Bing would give priority to negatives when conflicts arose.

Here’s a table explaining the change, which comes into force on May 21:

The new normalisation process is intended to more closely match users’ intentions when entering search queries and, theoretically, provide more relevant results.

As of May 21, Bing will no longer remove ‘stop words’ like ‘and’, ‘or’ and ‘the’ when normalising queries. It will also keep accents like ‘é’ in place.

Explaining the decision, Bing wrote:

For example, a user searching on the term “the office” vs. “office” could be looking for different things (The TV show vs. Microsoft Office) and thus could engage with an ad differently based on their particular intent.